We are excited to announce the availability of High I/O Instances for Amazon EC2, a new instance type that provides very high, low latency, disk I/O performance using SSD-based local instance storage. Customers whose applications require low latency access to tens of thousands of random IOPS can take advantage of the capabilities of this new Amazon EC2 instance. High I/O instances are ideal for high performance clustered databases, and are especially well suited for NoSQL databases like Cassandra and MongoDB. Customers across a spectrum of use cases, including media streaming, gaming, mobile, and social networking, can run applications storage I/O needs even more efficiently than before, while continuing to take advantage of the low cost and elasticity of Amazon EC2.

High I/O instances are available as a single instance type, High I/O Quadruple Extra Large (hi1.xlarge), in three Availability Zones in the US East (N. Virginia) region, and in two Availability Zones in the EU West (Ireland) region. We will add support for other regions in the coming months. For customers using Microsoft Windows Server, High I/O Instances are only supported with the Microsoft Windows Server AMIs for Cluster Instance Type.

You can learn more about the I/O performance and capabilities of High I/O instances for Amazon EC2 by visiting the Amazon EC2 instance type page.